Business entities (e.g., buyers) often rely on various goods and services supplied by other business entities (e.g., suppliers) to conduct their business. For example, a manufacturer of goods may need to purchase raw materials, parts, and machinery from various suppliers. Such manufacturers may also need to purchase delivery services from third party delivery suppliers to ensure that their manufactured goods reach consumers. Such purchases may result in the buyer incurring debt with multiple suppliers that may need to be paid periodically or at particular times depending on the requirements of each supplier.
To facilitate the payment of debt to multiple suppliers, accounts payable systems have been developed. As an example, an accounts payable system may utilize accounts issued to a buyer that can be used to make payments to the buyer's suppliers. Upon receipt of instructions from the buyer to pay debt owed to multiple suppliers, the accounts payable system can send account information (e.g., account numbers, expiration dates, etc.) to each supplier which may then initiate the transactions using the account information.
Although existing accounts payable systems can provide advantages such as facilitating the payment of debt owed to multiple suppliers in a convenient and efficient manner, such systems may also introduce a number of disadvantages. For example, the account information sent to a supplier may correspond to an account having a credit limit significantly higher than that needed to cover the payment amount. Thus, there may be risks associated with transmitting the account information to suppliers. Such risks may include fraud by unscrupulous suppliers, or suppliers inadvertently processing the transaction for an amount higher than that owed by the buyer. Additionally, since suppliers may store such sensitive information at least temporarily, there are opportunities for hackers or other fraudsters to gain unauthorized access to the account information.
Various controls have been implemented in an attempt to alleviate such problems with existing accounts payable systems. For example, an account credit limit can be adjusted prior to transmitting the account information to the supplier. As another example, an “authorization match” process can occur where a payment amount included in an authorization request message transmitted from the supplier to the account issuer can be compared to the payment amount included in the payment request received from the buyer. In these instances, however, the controls are generally implemented by a payment processing network with the ability to modify credit limits, review authorization messages, and decline transactions on behalf of account issuers. Thus, the controls are not available to suppliers with accounts issued by issuers that use payment processing networks without such controls or self-processing issuers that do not use payment processing networks to process their transactions. Moreover, credit limit adjustments and authorization match processes may undesirably consume computational processing resources and may increase the time required for accounts payable processing and subsequent transaction authorization.
Embodiments of the invention address these and other problems.